A Visual Journal

Zoe Leonard: Survey at Whitney Museum of American Art, March 2 – June 10, 2018

“Over the past three decades, Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) has produced work in photography, sculpture, and installation that is significant for its lyrical observations of daily life, as well as for its rigorous attention to the politics and conditions of image-making and display. Her work is wideranging in both form and subject matter, and addresses themes including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Leonard’s approach to photography engages with its history as a utilitarian, vernacular, and popular medium; similarly, her sculptures are often composed of found objects—commonplace items that bear signs of their use. Through repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard frames the quotidian in ways that challenge the viewer to reexamine the familiar.

Zoe Leonard: Survey is, as titled, a “survey” exhibition intended to give a broad overview of the artist’s work. But “to survey” is also to look out at a place or site and gauge it from multiple viewpoints in an effort to understand and describe it. It is this kind of mapping that Leonard undertakes both in her work and through the form of the exhibition. She encourages us to consider the Museum itself as a site and to question the conditions—be they cultural, social, economic, or political—that inflect our subjective points of view. Survey offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of perception and to take the measure of our own relationship to the world.” — Introductory Wall Text